On the Poet's Pages
by Only a Seamstress
Summary: Book-verse. Following the night on the Chesapeake, our couple's thoughts take a poetic turn. A story inspire by, and including snippets from, the works of Robert Browning, with a twist of Eliot for good measure. One-shot.


**On the Poet's Pages**

_This is a work aiming to combine Thomas Harris' beautiful characters with works of poetry. Browning has special focus in this work, so hopefully you have a vague knowledge of him, though I don't think you need a literature diploma or anything to like this! __**A brief warning: **__I am British; I have never been to the USA. As such, my understanding of Americanisms is based entirely on copious amounts of TV. I've used my own natural spellings because I believe trying to change the way you spell each word interrupts the creative process. However, I have, and will in all subsequent stories, tried to get the "American-ness" across. If I've used an odd-sounding word, please let me know in a review, it would be much appreciated! _

_Enjoy!_

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Upon the central bureau in the labyrinthine poetry library within Dr Lecter's memory palace was the complete anthology of Robert Browning. Not Dr Lecter's favourite poet by some distance, but hugely fitting tonight. Yes, the creative non-conformist who snatched away the talented woman from her possessive father. Fitting. And, of course, Elizabeth Barrett had improved her husband's poetry, given him more purpose. Fitting. And it was also nice to think that Browning had inspired T.S. Eliot, whom Clarice had cited as her favourite poet in their long days of talk. Ah, the intricate ways the world fitted together.

The book on the desk was open to one of Browing's best-known poems, _Porphyria's Lover_. It was the final rhyming couplet that Dr Lecter fixated on:

_And all night long we have not stirred,_

_And yet God has not said a word!_

Very appropriate for tonight, now that they lay in the quiet that had descended over the rented house on the Chesapeake following the night's great revelation. Hannibal Lecter was sure that God, if He saw at all, should be furious that a demon had ripped Clarice Starling from the path of righteous suffering, and should send His wrath upon them both. But there had been no smiting. Clarice slept peacefully with her arms wrapped around Dr Lecter.

He had felt compelled to draw her after she fell asleep, despite the awkward position he'd had to adopt to draw from within her embrace. Of course, with a mind such as his he could easily have invented an almost identical image, but, now that he had his view, he fully intended to indulge in the privileges of freedom. Evidence, perhaps, that this impossible event was tangible and real.

But that connection to _Porphyria's Lover _was not perfect. Two lovers together, and yet in Browning's poem, the narrator lies with the corpse of the woman he has killed.

_...all her hair_

_In one long yellow string I wound_

_Three times her little throat around_

_And strangled her..._

He could not escape the fact – even now that he had chosen a different path – that Clarice's death had been on his mind. He might have killed her. Even as the lover killed Porphyria, the poem's rhythm did not change, like a heartbeat that did not rise.

He would not have consumed her, but he would have ended her. He would have removed Clarice and installed Mischa in her place, by science or by miracle. _Monster. _

Starling shifted as she moved from sleep to waking.

"Mmmm..." she murmured, smiling, still half-blind from sleep as she stretched to kiss his lips. "Not asleep?"

"And miss such a vision? Sacrilege, Clarice." His voice betrayed nothing of his previous thoughts.

"You got to watch me sleep before, and now you're denying me the same pleasure! How is that fair?"

"Life isn't fair, Clarice," he murmured, nuzzling into her hair.

"What's the matter?" she asked, suddenly serious.

"Nothing of import."

"Bullshit. Tell me."

He studied her, the tip of his red tongue slipping idly out to touch his upper lip. He spoke at last: "_Porphyria's Lover _concerns me."

"I know that poem," she said thoughtfully. He delighted in watching her access it in her mind. "I thought you didn't get concerned."

"Only rarely."

"That's the poem about the guy that strangles the woman with her own hair, right? Why's that... _oh._ Oh come on, you don't regret anything. Ever!"

"Not entirely true, Clarice." He was pleased at her lack of distress. The drugs would have almost entirely worn off now. There would certainly not be enough left for her to be kept calm artificially anymore. And that was all he'd really done, kept her calm. She had chosen everything else. His manipulative little starling.

"What were you actually planning on doing to me?" she asked curiously, stretching appealingly as she spoke. "Before _this_." She indicated their embrace and the rumpled bedclothes.

"Perhaps kill you," he said evenly, "to make space for Mischa. Perhaps eject you from your mind, conditioning you to an extent that I could have put her in instead. I had not finalised the plans yet. That was dependent on your responses, my dear."

"Dependent on my responses? You were leaving me a lot of room, weren't you? You're the guy who plans _everything._"

He propped himself up on his elbow, resting his chin on his knuckles. Where was she going?

"What I'm saying is: do you not think you were... I don't know... subconsciously planning _this_?" The same _this_ as before, apparently. "See, when I went to Muskrat Farm, I had no idea how I was going to get you in the car. I had a vague thought about handcuffing you, but after that... pfff, not a clue. And my trying to take you down would've worked about as well as you trying to psychologically condition me did." She was rewarded with the smile that frightens some. It did very different things to her. "What we both managed to do, me getting you outta there and you helping me work through all that trauma, that was what we really wanted to do. Everything else was just... I dunno, an excuse to do it?"

"That seems rather conveniently romantic, doesn't it?" he replied dryly, head tilted to one side. She found that very attractive, now. Funny it had once seemed so intimidating.

"You just don't like it when _I_ come up with the smart psychological crap," she returned, shoving gently against his shoulder. He snatched her hand before she could retract it and leant it to catch her soul's warmth.

"Neither of us," he murmured against her ear, "really know what we do. We found each other in such darkness."

"I know," she whispered back, her hands finding his sleek hair. It was still in disarray from her mussing it hours before. "But I know how I feel about you."

"How you feel about a madman?" It was a test and they both knew it. They both knew, too, that he _feared_ the answer. Such a rare, rare thing for him, sour in an exotic way, but he did fear what she would say next.

"Maybe you're mad, maybe you're not. You're sure as hell a long way from the rest of humanity. But that's not bad. Or if it is bad, I don't want it to be good."

He exhaled, his breath caressing her ear. She rearranged them so she was lying on her back with his head pillowed on her breasts. A door within his memory palace, closed only recently, swung sensually open to him. Clarice's kisses after their coupling. Not hungry, lustful kisses now – though those had been most welcome too – but tender kisses, kind kisses, kisses that told him she cared about him in a way that he had not been cared about for torturously long. She'd kissed his lips very gently first, then moved to his damaged eye. The concept of 'kissing better' was not unknown to Hannibal Lecter, but he had never experienced it. A first time for everything, it seemed. She'd done the same to the burn on his chest, and his bruises and cuts and the ugly mark that still showed where the dart had pierced him. He'd lain in rapture, barely able to comprehend this level of affection. Then, galvanised by her hands touching his face again, he'd moved to shower her in kisses too.

Now they lay still together, and she was sure he had been setting his heart beating by hers, getting ready to sleep, when he said: "Tell me, Clarice, are you familiar with the concept of the Campagna?"

"It sounds European."

"In some ways yes and in some ways no. It is the area outside Rome. Literary convention, however, would have it that it is a symbolic place where the usual rules of society do not apply."

"Sounds like the place for us."

"Quite, Clarice."

"You aren't intending for us to go to Italy, are you?" she was suddenly all warning, the cool-headed agent snapping away the lethargic, post-coital bliss. Nevertheless, the concept of 'us' still made Dr Lecter's small white teeth flash in the near-darkness.

"No, Clarice, though I should consider it a failure if I did not take you to Italy in all our time together. That will, however, be a trip for some time from now, when the trail has cooled somewhat. At least five years, I'm afraid, but we shall get there."

"So what was with bringing up the Campagna?"

"Only the idea of how very perverse our relationship is."

"I know that what the rest of the world thinks doesn't bother you, so you can only be mentioning this to find out if it bothers me."

He decided against telling her she'd done well in her deductions – she was no longer a trainee agent to be patronised.

"I don't care," she went on, "what crap anyone makes up about this. I'm here because I want to be. I wasn't so drugged up that I couldn't tell you'd given me back my gun and my car. I made a conscious decision to stay, and I don't regret it. So yes, I want to be in this 'Campagna' with you, and no, whatever _The Tattler _says about me being your whore or being dead or you being a monster or any other bullshit they can find a schmuck dumb enough to print is not going to change my decision."

He grinned like a Cheshire cat. He took a strand of her hair in his fingers and toyed with it absently. He hated to admit that Chilton had been right, but it did shine beautifully, even now, when there was hardly any light.

"You will, I'm afraid, have to take some measures to ensure our safety, Clarice. You shall have to stop looking like you."

She nodded calmly. "New faces?"

"I certainly shall be getting a new face, but I think perhaps we could avoid changing too greatly the appearance of the bones in your face."

"Dye my hair?" she suggested. Then she smirked wickedly. "Maybe a nice _yellow_."

Her reference to his earlier concerns made him tug on the hair he held. He measured the force carefully to just avoid causing pain. "If you like, Clarice."

She was off thinking again, though, of _Porphyria's Lover._

"There's a guy who kills the girl and keeps her body in a bath in _Sweeney Agonistes,_" Starling mused as she caressed his head.

"There's also some talk of cannibalism," Dr Lecter put in helpfully.

"I could never read it in the same way after being in Gumb's basement and in the bathroom... you know where Sweeney goes: '...he kept her there a bath / With a gallon of Lysol in a bath'?"

"It really is most unpleasant to keep an intact corpse in one's home," he answered airily.

She prodded him in the chest, none too gently, though he noticed she avoided his damaged flesh.

"I'm glad having Krendler for dinner brought us here," she said, "but I'd be a lot happier not eating any more humans, or parts of humans, or whatever."

"Tut tut, so fussy! I'm sure that won't impact our life too much, however. My own dietary habits have altered rather in recent years."

"You don't need to promise me anything."

"I believe you, Clarice. You would never ask. I even flatter myself so far as to say you would not detest me for continuing in my old ways. But nevertheless, you yourself have given up so much that it seems only fair that I, in kind, sacrifice something."

"If anyone ever tries to take you, don't hesitate to kill the bastard." The honest conviction with which she spoke filled him with a dark joy. He'd never conceived that he could be valued so highly by anyone but his sister. Yet Mischa's love had been based purely on his presence in her life, on his closeness and his immediate actions. Clarice knew his crimes, would have seen Chilton's precious photograph of the nurse he had maimed before she ever spoke to him, had watched him kill... and yet here she was, holding him in her arms and giving him her love.

She was such a strong creature that for her, as for himself, loving was an act of immense courage, yet here they lay. Together.

"I'll carry you off," he murmured to her, "to a cannibal isle!"

"You'll be the cannibal?" she responded, her sarcasm at odds with the line's intended tone.

"Do you doubt me, Clarice?"

"Yeah, I do doubt that you ever seriously intended to have me in a nice little, white little, missionary stew."

A lewd comment about the word 'missionary' bubbled up in her mind, but she deliberately set it aside. His sneer told her the same thought had crossed his mind. _Well of course it has, _she thought._ EVERYTHING crosses his mind._

"There's also more," she told him with immense dignity, "to life than birth, and copulation, and death."

He held her gaze, and she saw entire civilisations rise and crumble in his eyes. What he lived with every day, with a mind like that, would, she was sure, kill anyone else. It was a miracle that he was as sane as he was.

"He didn't know," Dr Lecter recited from later in the play, "if he was alive and the girl was dead. He didn't know if the girl was alive and he was dead. He didn't know if they were both alive or both were dead."

She sensed these were the words to describe his feelings tonight. She remembered the look on his face as he'd extracted himself from her embrace in the firelight to move to the harpsichord and strike, with brutal beauty, the D below middle C. She also remembered the look on his face when she'd followed him across the room and had held his angular face in her hands to lean in and kiss him softly. Cherished memories. _If I saw you every day, forever, I'd remember this time. _

"It's alright now," she said. The words sounded so simple to her.

"Death or life or life or death," he said. There was the faintest whisper of that metallic rasp returning to his voice. She held him as though to let him go would doom them both. Her wiry strength was matched by his own as they clung tight. "When you're alone like he was alone... you're either or neither..."

_I love you_, she thought, knowing he'd find the thought somehow in his inspection of the inner workings of her mind. A snippet of poetry she knew to be from Browning scratched at her consciousness. Something simple, something suitable.

"_Let's contend no more, Love,_

_ Strive nor weep –_

_ All be as before, Love,_

_ – Only sleep!"_

He made the merest noise of displeasure. Anyone who knew nothing of him would have missed it. Anyone who did know him – save for Clarice Starling – would have been terrified by this noise of displeasure. Starling herself found it sweet.

"I despise that poem," he said simply, as though detestation were perfectly natural. _Which it is_, Starling mused, _he's just probably the only man in the world prepared to admit it. _"The conflicted is far too mundane. I prefer _The Laboratory_, with its vengeful potions. "

"It's always gonna be a big battle with you around," she told him.

"Yes, I expect so," he agreed.

She kissed his forehead. He lay looking at her as she closed her eyes and slowly slipped from the waking world. He could have told her that he'd never slept in anyone's arms before, that he'd always taken his leave before the collisions of copulation could turn towards such possible intimacy. He chose to hold his peace so they could both sleep now. There would be time to tell her, eventually, when they had a home together. A shared life. Two in the Campagna.

He would teach her to build her own memory palace. He so enjoyed the content of her mind. They would have a place to share, soon. Room after room, he would be able to hunt the whole house they inhabited together, just to find her. Spend the whole day in the quest, – who cares? Such closets to explore, such alcoves to importune! With these hopes of a jointly inhabited house and a jointly inhabited mind, he at last drifted into slumber.

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**_Notes on the text_**

**"On the poet's pages" is a line from Browning's ****_Women and Roses_**

**All quotations from ****_Porphyria's Lover_**** are already referenced**

**"catch her soul's warmth" and "setting his heart beating by hers" are both references to lines in Browning's ****_Two in the Campagna, _****as are all the lines about the Campagna**

**_Sweeney Agonistes _****was an unfinished work by T S Eliot, and large parts of the dialogue from it are recounted by Lecter and Starling here**

**"Let's contend..." is from ****_A Woman's Last Word, _****again by Robert Browning**

**Lecter's final thought beginning "Room after room" are drawn from Browning's poem ****_Love in A Life_****, a beautifully appropriate work for this couple as it uses domestic, 'house' vocabulary to describe a man getting to understand his lover. I would recommend this to any Starling/Lecter fan as a great read!**

**Thanks for reading, please leave a review!**


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